Douglas Carswell

Douglas Carswell was first elected to Parliament in 2005 by a slender 920 votes. He was returned as MP for Clacton in 2010 with a 12,000 majority. He is the author of The End of Politics and the Birth of iDemocracy and believes that the internet is making the world a vastly better place.

Battle buses and war rooms: why military metaphors are a daft way to describe politics

The West Dorset constituency leafleting campaign had begun in earnest. (Photo: Wikimedia)

The next election will be a battleground, the pundits like to tell us. The parties will mobilise their footsoldiers and battle buses. Using their grids, they will launch an air war from their war rooms. We are, it seems, invited to see politics as a form of warfare.

What rot.

The use of military metaphors to describe electioneering is absurd. No election I ever took part in was decided by any military-style manoeuvring. Still less by strut and bombast.

Elections are largely about undecided voters. Instead of “battle grounds” or “front lines”, think of an undecided voter standing on their doorstep on a cold, wet evening. The door ajar, the householder half wishing you hadn’t knocked at all.

There is absolutely nothing militaristic about trying to get their vote.

Perhaps the fact we use military metaphors to describe election campaigns tells us more about our political class than it does about the actual process of winning over hearts and minds – and votes.

Elections are a contest in the art of persuading. Swing voters need to be won over. Supporters need to be reminded that their vote is vital.

I have always been struck by how many politicians persist in seeing what they do as a form of warfare. Perhaps that explains why so many politicos attack each other, imagining that it will somehow win it with the undecideds.

Or why so many – especially male – campaigners think they can change what a voter thinks about something by talking to them on their doorstep for long enough. (Guys, The time to change perceptions is never during a campaign, but long before it starts. Election campaigns are about the things folk already know).

Perhaps the military metaphors are symptoms of how depersonalised politics and the art of political communication had become.

As the internet hyper-personalises the way political candidates interact with voters, perhaps we will need to use a rather different set of metaphors to describe political communication. I hope so.